Researchers find that female PC gamers outnumber males

Surveys conducted by analyst firm Superdata Research have found that in the US, women play more PC games overall than men. They also play more RPGs on PC than men, while men outnumber women in the FPS and MMO genres.

For all practical purposes it's a 50/50 split, but once you get into decimal places, female PC gamers do slightly outnumber males. Women represent 50.2 percent of PC gamers across all genres, including social (Facebook, Kongregate), versus 49.9 percent for men. The scales dip slightly further toward women when it comes to the RPG genre, with 53.6 percent of the market made up of women, while men represent 46.5 percent. In the FPS and MMO genres, however, 66 percent of players are men.

Senior analyst Stephanie Llamas wrote in a follow-up blog post that the growing popularity of "casual platforms" has helped reinforce the false assumption that women are primarily casual gamers. But the reality, says Llamas, is that half of female PC gamers in the US consider themselves either "mid-core or hardcore gamers."

"It is true that 58 percent of mobile gamers in the US are women. But it is also true that just over 50 percent of American PC gamers are women," she wrote. "In fact, women are the largest gaming demographic for PC role-playing games (54 percent) and they represent almost 40 percent of MMO and digital console gamers. So to say that women are just casual gamers is empirically false."